Reading In A Democracy

                I can remember playing the game.  Very early in our education we learn how to respond to the reading assignments that are given us in school.  We learn to sacrifice our own insights and tastes to those of the class and the teacher.  I was pretty good at it.  I remember feeling like what we read in school was somehow better, more important, than the other stuff we read.  Having spent more than forty years on the other side of the desk, my view of those early days is a lot different now.  It always made me sad to see students unwilling to read on their own, to take a risk or just enjoy the ride.  The selection of texts and the enforcement of interpretation is still going on in school, but most of the ‘reading’ (it doesn’t have to be a text) in the culture has shifted to other venues.  I think reading in a democracy presents a different set of challenges to education.

                The late English cultural critic, Raymond Williams, often resisted the idea of the literary canon by remarking, “we have moved from pulpits to library carrels” as a means of enforcing culture.  He worked in Cambridge with F.R. Leavis who played a central role in creating the canon of English literature.  That canon amounted to what Harrari calls an ‘imagined order,’ the official story of who we are and how we got here.  Just as Defoe made it clear there was no ‘true born’ Englishman, literary canons and cultural narratives are all fabrications.  We teach them, sometimes following the same methods as biblical scholars (its own unique form of fabrication), as the truth.  So much of what Americans think of their own cultural heritage and the creation and practice of their democracy is part of an imagined order based on enforced reading in school.  Most of it is problematic or just flat out wrong. 

                On the North Side of Chicago, a high school is in the middle of a culture war over who’s story will and will not be part of the curriculum.  As a fairly affluent school with a lot of white students who intend to enter the race for Ivy League admissions, there is a strong push to teach the classics and prepare students for the cultural name dropping required and expected in that game.  As an integrated school with a large non-white and not so affluent group of students, there is a strong push for inclusion.  The ‘canon wars’ have been going on for awhile now, and this iteration is pretty similar to others, but it occurs at a more critical juncture in our cultural struggle with race.  There are other issues just as important in a democracy, such as the inclusion of LGBTQ students, but as the undemocratic white supremist we elected president lurches toward a re-election campaign, race is taking center stage.

                In the America I grew up in, we all had to settle for the same story.  We all read the same things and watched one of the three versions of the evening news.  We didn’t know and weren’t allowed to suggest that any of that was a lie.  It was served up like prison food, take it or leave it.  But the America I grew up in wasn’t really a democracy.  Everybody didn’t count, and not everybody was even allowed to vote.  The struggle in Chicago comes at a moment of reckoning about where we’ve been and where we’re going.  If this is going to be a democracy, the struggle over what gets read is critical.  A curriculum is a means of cultural dominance and exclusion. Just as people use the notion of ‘morality’ to restrict intergenerational change, a curriculum props up an imagined order.  That imagined order was invalidated by Trump’s election.

                Teaching the canon won’t get everybody, including a lot of privileged students who think they deserve it, admission to an Ivy League school.  It won’t even get every student into college.  It will guarantee that the narrative is limited, and that we continue to create a country where some stories aren’t told and don’t get reflected in our politics.  We perpetuate stories about ‘welfare queens’ that were never true and obscure the struggles and heroism of the working poor who struggle to feed their children.  We use narratives about gang violence to validate the mistreatment, incarceration, and murder of young men of color.  A democracy demands that they tell their own story and that that others see, hear and read that story.

                We find or lose each other in what we read and see.  A democratic education has to make the whole range of the people who make up this democracy visible.  Just as many of the well trained and well- intentioned teachers in that school in Chicago are finding out, we are not trained for this.  The curriculum has to be opened up to new story tellers and new presenters.  We will never be able to heal the rift in Chicago or anywhere else without listening.  Reading in a democracy means reading someone else’s story while they read yours, not because there’s a right answer, because there isn’t.  A democracy has to be humane.  Humanity is developed and protected by readers.